Red Potato

About

Red Potatoes are small and round in shape with a thin smooth, red colored skin. These potatoes are high in moisture and sugar, but low in starch content. They hold shape well when cooked and have a firm moist texture.

The most common varieties of Red Potatoes include the Red Lasoda and Pontiac types which are good for boiling, salads, soups, hash browns and any preparation that calls for the potato to hold its shape. Red Potatoes are not well suited for deep frying due to their high sugar content.

Physical Description

Tasting Notes

Mouthfeel: Creamy when baked or mashed and crunchy when thin sliced and deep fried

Food complements: Salads, Vegetables

Wine complements: Red wine, White wine

Beverage complements: Juice, Coffee, Soda

Substitutes: Potatoes

Selecting and Buying

Seasonality: january, august, september, opctober, november, december

Choosing: Good-quality red potatoes will be firm, smooth-skinned and have bright-red coloring. They should have few eyes, and those few eyes should be shallow.

Avoid product that is soft, wrinkled, has cuts in the skin or is green-tinted.

Purchase red potatoes that are firm to the touch, with a deep pink-red color throughout. Avoid buying red potatoes that are shriveled as well as those that have developed "eyes." Also eliminate those that have discolored spots. Steer clear of potatoes that are soft or mushy to the touch. All of those things are indications that the potatoes have already begun to spoil

Buying: You can buy Red Potatoes at the local and supermarkets

Procuring: Check out this link to know more about growing Red Potatoes

http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetables/p/Potatoes.htm

or you can watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmEYLwMs5ns

Preparation and Use

Cleaning: Wash red potatoes thoroughly before storing them. Use a vegetable brush to clean the potato while immersed in a bowl of water. Scrubbing is an important step since it ensures that you get rid of as much bacteria as possible.

Rinse the potato under fresh running water. This will rinse away any remaining bacteria left from the scrubbing process.

Conserving and Storing

Do not store potatoes in the refrigerator. Refrigeration converts the starch in potatoes to sugar which will cause the potato to darken when cooked.

Prolonged exposure to light causes greening and makes the potato taste bitter. Peel or pare green area from the potato before using.

Throw away any unusable potatoes found in the bag that were not noticed at the time of purchase. Use the same guidelines to determine the vegetable's usability as outlined in Step 1. If rotting or spoiled potatoes are not remove,d they can accelerate the spoilage of the rest of the potatoes in the bag.

Place potatoes in a "green" bag used for protecting vegetables. Green bags help to extend the potatoes usability, meaning they will last between 20 to 30 percent longer than if stored in the bag in which they were purchased. Never put clean potatoes back into their original bag since bacteria may exist there that can undo all of your previous preparation.

Put the newly bagged red potatoes in a cool, yet dry, place; preferably away from any light source. The key word is "dry" since moisture will cause the potatoes to rot more quickly than usual.

Examine unused potatoes every couple of days with an eye toward removing any that might show signs of spoilage. Rewash and rebag potatoes in a clean green bag if spoilage was found present.

Choosing red potatoes individually may prove to be cheaper than purchasing them by the bag since bad vegetables can be avoided. Purchase potatoes in small quantities to avoid having spoilage occur before the vegetables are used. Vitamins and nutrients are in the potato skin and just underneath it, so choose recipes that use the entire potato whenever possible.

Do not eat the stems of a potato or the eyes that grow as the vegetable begins to die since both contain an unhealthy toxin.

Social/Political

The United Nations FAO reports that the world production of potatoes in 2008 was 314 million tonnes. The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the twenty-first century included about 33 kg (or 73 lb) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world's largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes is harvested in China and India. The geographic shift of potato production has been away from wealthier countries toward lower-income areas of the world, although the degree of this trend is ambiguous.

In 2008, several international organizations highlighted the potato's role in world food production, in the face of developing economic problems. They cited its potential derived from its status as a cheap and plentiful crop that grows in a wide variety of climates and locales. Due to perishability, only about 5% of the world's potato crop is traded internationally; its minimal presence in world financial markets contributed to its stable pricing during the 2007–2008 world food price crisis. Thus, the United Nations officially declared the year 2008 as the International Year of the Potato, to raise its profile in developing nations, calling the crop a "hidden treasure".